On open computing platforms, such as a personal computer (PC) system for example, when playing premium content (such as from a DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.), the digital rights management (DRM) processing and key management are typically performed in software by a media player application program. These schemes are not well protected and there have been instances of hacking, resulting in pirated content and loss of revenue to content owners. When content is played, even though the media decompression (such as H.264, MPEG-2, etc.) is done in hardware, the content is in the clear in system memory and can be stolen with software-based and/or hardware-based attacks. Due to these noted security weaknesses, only lower fidelity (such as standard definition (SD)) content or less valuable high definition (HD) content is typically distributed to open computing platforms. Improvements to the secure handling of digital content by open computing platforms (such as a PC, for example) are desired.
In order for users to securely share content between open computing platforms, in some current systems users are allowed to create domains and add devices to a domain via cloud-based services. However, the users may want to be able to share content with friends and/or family in an ad-hoc fashion without having to authorize the new devices for all of their content. In some cases, the user may want to allow one person or device to share a particular content title, and perhaps even just temporarily. Existing services and systems do not provide such capabilities.